Puerto Rico’s Law 183-2025 recognizes the unborn as natural persons from conception, reshaping civil rights, family life and pro-life advocacy.
Newsroom (31/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) On Dec. 21, Puerto Rico entered uncharted legal and cultural territory with the stroke of a pen. Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón approved Law 183-2025, a measure that amends the island’s Civil Code to recognize the unborn child — the nasciturus, “conceived but not born” — as a natural person from the moment of conception.
For Father Carlos Pérez Toro, pastor of Santa Rosa de Lima Church in San Juan and a civil lawyer, this is more than a technical tweak to legal language. It is, he says, a milestone in the history of pro-life advocacy in the U.S. territory — and a decisive recognition that the “human being in gestation” is no longer merely a legal abstraction, but a subject of rights woven into Puerto Rico’s private law, family life and cultural imagination.
A civil code rewrites the beginning of personhood
Law 183-2025 targets the core of Puerto Rico’s Civil Code — the framework that quietly governs daily life: contracts, inheritance, taxes, family ties and the relations between one private citizen and another. The reform takes an old Latin term, nasciturus, and extends it in a radical new direction.
“It is recognized that the human being in gestation is a natural person from the first moment of conception; using a legal term that only applied when a human being was born, it is said that he or she has legal personality and capacity from the first moment of conception,” Father Pérez Toro explained, capturing the law’s sweeping change. Where the previous Civil Code treated fetal rights as conditional — dependent on live birth and carefully balanced against a pregnant woman’s constitutional claims — the new law declares that every conceived child “is a natural person” for all favorable purposes.
That shift may sound abstract, but its consequences are concrete. In one move, Puerto Rico has placed the unborn alongside born children within the Civil Code’s architecture of personality and capacity. The unborn now stand not as potential rights-holders, but as persons already inscribed in law, with their interests presumptively protected in civil relations — from the contents of a will to the terms of a health-insurance policy.
From the womb to the will and the tax form
The law’s most immediate effects play out in the intimate world of family and household finances. “Thank God we have achieved clear recognition in Puerto Rico that the human being in gestation is a natural person with all rights, as if he or she had been born,” Father Pérez Toro said. “Imagine what that means for the mother who now has a new instrument to defend her child.”
In practical terms, he noted, every pregnant woman in Puerto Rico can now designate her unborn child as an heir. The law “equate[s] the child in the womb with a child who has been born,” opening inheritance channels that once depended on birth as a legal threshold. The implications ripple out into tax law as well: a child in the womb, the priest explained, can now be claimed as a new dependent when it comes time to pay taxes, bringing fiscal policy into alignment with the new definition of legal personhood.
Lawmakers went further by cataloging examples of benefits the unborn could claim through their parents: protections enforced against health insurance companies, participation in personal injury lawsuits, eligibility in donations and property rights, and even certain labor-related claims asserted on their behalf. All of these, the measure suggests, now fall within reach under the broader umbrella of civil personality granted to the nasciturus.
Essential rights before birth
The country’s civil-law tradition supplied the tools; Law 183-2025 simply widened their application. The Civil Code’s Article 74, titled “Enjoyment of Essential Rights,” already recognizes “essential rights of personality, dignity and honor, freedom of thought, conscience or religion, freedom of action, privacy, inviolability of his/her home, physical and moral integrity, and intellectual creation.”
“All of this applies to the human being in gestation,” Father Pérez Toro said, insisting that the unborn are now clearly covered by that list. That means — in civil law terms — the unborn child is not only an heir or a tax dependent, but a bearer of dignity and honor, a subject of physical and moral integrity, and someone whose privacy and freedom of conscience must be factored into legal disputes. Seen from this angle, Law 183-2025 is less a single statute than a key that unlocks the entire catalog of personality rights for those not yet born.
Still, the measure does not independently rewrite the island’s criminal statutes or impose new abortion prohibitions. Analysts on the island have underscored that the reform addresses civil concepts such as dignity, inheritance and recognition, leaving abortion regulation and criminal liability to a separate legal track — one likely to be tested in the years to come as courts and lawmakers wrestle with how far fetal personhood extends.
The ‘nene’ in Puerto Rican culture
For Father Pérez Toro, the legal revolution mirrors a cultural reality that has long been present in Puerto Rican homes and clinics. “That is not a fetus. That is a ‘nene,’ as women in Puerto Rico call the human being in gestation, the child in the womb,” he said. “They say, ‘That is my ‘nene,’ and they celebrate when they see the first ultrasound of the ‘nene’ in the first weeks when it has a little head, etc.”
“This Civil Code does justice to that Puerto Rican cultural expression that there is not a ‘cell,’ not a ‘zygote,’ but a human being, a ‘nene’ like the ‘nenes’ who walk the streets,” he added, arguing that law is finally catching up to the emotional vocabulary of expectant mothers. The law thus functions not only as a juridical statement, but as an affirmation of a shared intuition — that the life glimpsed on a grainy black-and-white ultrasound is someone, not something, and that this someone should be sheltered by the same fabric of civil protections that covers those already born.
The priest also voiced gratitude toward Puerto Rico’s evangelical churches, crediting them with having “fought the good fight, and they fought it with passion” despite pressure from academic institutions, professional associations and other sectors that raised alarms about the measure. In his view, the law’s passage represents the convergence of legal expertise, faith-based advocacy and a deep-seated popular conviction about the humanity of the unborn.
A ‘historic victory’ for babies and moms
Beyond the island, pro-life advocates see Puerto Rico’s move as a signal to policymakers elsewhere in the United States. “This new law in Puerto Rico is a historic victory for babies and moms across the island and a powerful example for lawmakers throughout the United States,” said Kelsey Pritchard, communications director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
“Science is clear that a new, distinct human life begins at conception, and this law reflects that reality,” Pritchard added. “It sends a clear and hopeful message: Every single person has value and deserves a chance at life.” The organization, she said, “applauds Puerto Rico’s leaders for choosing compassion, human dignity, and protection for the most vulnerable among us.”
On an island where debates over abortion, autonomy and faith have grown increasingly intense, Law 183-2025 now stands as a defining text. For its backers, it is the culmination of years of legal drafting and pro-life organizing; for its critics, it is the starting gun for a new phase of constitutional and human-rights litigation. What is certain is that, in Puerto Rico’s Civil Code, the unborn child — the nasciturus, the nene — now appears not at the margins, but at the very center of legal personhood
– Raju Hasmukh with files from OSV News
Related Images:
